There's twenty-five new accounts mentioned on the front page.
Of those:

nine have no personal information filled in at all.

two have websites which are unreachable

four have websites which have no information about software or which are unreadable in lynx

one has a link to a project website and I can't find his name mentioned anywhere in it

That's more than 60% of the people. Of the remaining, found about four I could reasonably
certify, since I was able to find free software or docs or something on their
pages. I am not qualified to judge 'em, so sorry if the
certifications appear low to you.

the Googlizer is a tiny program that uses X-selection in Gnome with some GDK stuff which is covered in the GTK+ docs

That's the best I can do, and not being a coder means I am not even sure whether that's the kind of thing you want: but "How do I use selection in GNOME?" comes up a lot on IRC and more or better examples or doc pointers would be very welcome.

Damn. I really must update the Gnome FAQ stuff. I took a list of it to Austria with me, and got sidetracked bug-dinking (categorising and speculating and stuff).

Tried to certify a few more people, along the same lines as last time. Yet again, a good half of the Observers have no personal information and no link to look for such information. I can't certify people who put nothing. It would be silly.

Let's see. What have I done in the free software world to
justify that scarily long list of certifications recently?
Um.

More GNOME
Users' FAQ stuff. Needs more work. Much more. I have a
bunch of additions on my machine, but jade is being a pest
about some of it, and I have this thing about commiting
DocBook which will pass jade first time.

Alan and Malcolm did loads of work on gnorpm, whose bug
reports were getting a bit out of hand. I went though and
closed a lot of bugs with the aid of other people's scripts.
Malcolm worked out we'd closed over 900 of the things. I
got about five responses, one to say that the URL I
suggested for an update didn't exist. Ho hum. Only
800 to go.

Saw someone making a valiant attempt to certify people
languishing at observer level. They said they'd got tired
towards the end, so I started from Z and worked my way up
the list. Found several names I recognised. Please don't
be offended if I put apprentice and you think you deserve
more: I can't judge other people's code, and some things
were in C, javascript, C++, php and all manner of languages.
If I could find the sources of a program off someone's
homepage, I put apprentice for now: one or two got more
because they were people of whom I knew more. I also decided
that "How I got this working" documents were contributions
and included those. I got to the top of the 'w's, and
stopped there. The number of people who put no contact
details and no home page (or a home page consisting of one
gif in one case) was quite incredible.

Not that I can talk, having to have it pointed out to me
that I didn't close a tag on here :) Edited to correct.

Updated the GNOME FAQ. 21 names in the contributors now.
Woo! I
really need to sit down and work out how I mark up and fill
in
the right bits for the GNU docs licence, and then it goes
into
maintenance mode, with luck. Because it's not currently on
the main GNOME pages, just in CVS, shoved a version onto my
[edited to remove dead site] pages, and started weeding out potentially useful
threads from a far-too-full folder of messages saved from
gnome-devel-list so that someone else can provide the
answers
and drake can do the developer FAQ.

Talked to jdub and
terral
about
whether developers and users have any shared understanding
of
what makes a useful bug report (frankly, I just guess) or
how much
work you can actually expect a "switched new computer on,
started exciting free OS up, something broke, now what?"
person to do digging for relevant information. Wondered
whether getting a bunch of people who fix bugs, resolve them
in the BTSs, or send in patches
and people who find them and try to report them together in
the same room would help, and considered attempting this in
Australia
(because I'm going there, apparently, in January). Started
thinking
about ways to get some useful info before that. This is
mostly
spawned by a thread about "help! bugs.gnome.org is feeling
full!" on
one of the GNOME lists and the different attitudes to
different... um... styles, shall we say, of reporting bugs.

Saw glenn's
comments about "some people were a bit rude but I coped" and
it reminded me that I need to flame pointlessly about people
flaming
pointlessly. Or something. Another on the to-do pile.
Basically, I don't like a lot of the forms of what pass for
communication on the web and net today, and I think more
people need to think about how they are coming across and
whether someone who is paying by the minute for their access
really needs to be flamed when they ask a question. It's
possible to explain "this is the wrong place for this"
without some of the more obnoxious comments I see. At least,
I hope it is. If this is the example we set people arriving
now, we're going to regret it when they pass it on to the
next generation to arrive and we'll be complaining about
"youth of today... no respect...grumble grumble..." and next
thing it'll be "bring back national service" and I'll be
voting for the tories or something. And that would be bad,
really it would. Especially because the aforementioned next
generation will outnumber us substantially...

Lots of people are talking about LWE, which apparently
claims it's the biggest Linux show. Not that I have seen
reliable numbers, but I suspect this will surprise the
LinuxTag folks. LinuxTag actually sounds to have been more
fun, and that's not just because of the parties, truly.

Lots of people seem to have completely missed the point of
the GNOME Foundation. But then, I had the advantage not only
of the press reports but of seeing raph type in
the summary of the RA broadcast of the thing for we
bandwidth-challenged types. (Wow, he's a fast typer.) The
press
missed out Miguel's comments about GNOME being about people,
and by individuals all over the world, completely. Of
course, I could have missed the point of the Foundation,
too, but my take's at least more optimistic :)

I was going to applaud thomasq
for his mention of rugby, but I just saw that he missed
Wales out of great rugby nations, so I'm going to sulk
instead.

Long entry, but then I seem to be making them once a month,
so you can live in peace for a bit. I do actually have a
couple of potential article/rambles in the pipeline, but
most things in that pipeline seem to get stuck half-way
along. Oh well.

If Russ
has not yet finished that book, I suppose I should probably
not
discuss the ending. Paah. (Boglet, indeed!)

Have done very
very
little to justify apprentice rating, let alone journeyer,
over the last
few weeks (busy, away, busy, guests, away, busy). Hmm. Now,
if
this keeps up for a year (I hope it doesn't!), it's really
going to screw the ratings up, since they're supposed to be
based on the last year. I think Advogato needs a time-out
system. When you
login, you could get, "Note: your rating of the following
people has
expired. Recertify?"

I can't think why someone whose entry has now scrolled off
the recent
diary entries thinks I'm so good with DocBook. I still
haven't figured out tables or the CDATA stuff. But it was
kind, if not accurate :)

Steven
Rainwater was asking about FidoNet. I remember that. All
those poor posters to Usenet talking about "Mind your
language, this echo is moderated!" when posting to alt.* :)
More seriously, I have several friends who used it, and one
who was looking at it as a simple way to get younger
siblings onto the net since they had such happy memories of
it. And this was last year.

I found the Godel, Escher, Bach book really hard going,
but I am going to have to look at this stuff that schoen
mentions. Um. I hope it's the same author or I'm about to
look stupid. On the subject of authors, I see there's yet
another person
here who's read David Brin's "Earth" and is making
connections and comparisons.

I suppose, that since this is
a developer-type site, I should say what I've actually done
recently, but there hasn't been a lot, largely because I am
not a developer... But anyway, sent a bunch of bug reports
in -- and one got bounced by one BTS and others were to
GNOME's bug-tracker, which is apparently down. So that was
productive. Solved a friend's woes getting Linux installed
and set-up correctly, which was a mistake, because now he
thinks I know more than I do and I shall have to find out
more when he hits the next snag. Whoops.

Oh yes. Someone
said "Telsa, if you're reading this..." in their diary a
while ago. Only problem is, I forget who that was, and what
they wanted. Email would be good: the diaries are getting a
little too numerous to go through everyone's to find something.

So apparently jamesh and
sad share
a birthday. Still I know no-one with mine. The closest person is Dick, who,
fortunately lives in the same town, so joint celebrations
are easy. And JennV
shares one with my sister, but they live about as far away
as sad and jamesh.

I'm writing here because I think putting Advogato-related
thoughts in my diary
will confuse the people who read that. Oh dear, two diaries.
How ostentious.

The whole certification thing: loads of
people have certified me, and I feel a bit rotten not
certifying them back. My problem is that much of the
certification looks to me like I would have to make
judgements about things like -- well, code. Yeah, right. I
could probably decide based on other things: many of the
people here are people who have spent time and effort fixing
bugs, explaining things (everything from fonts to find
syntax) or rescuing me from near-disaster at very short
notice from mailing list woes, DocBook travails, and CVS
horrors. That's certainly something I can
comment on :)

"anti-"certification: yuk. If you don't
think someone does anything positive, then don't certify
them, or certify them as Observer. I've seen loads of
comments about the colour ranges: reading Advogato mostly
with Lynx, I have managed to miss that, so my impressions of
people are based on the info they provide about themselves,
the links to their projects (wow, there's some cool ones
about) and what they write. It's fun like that. If ever the
day comes when diaries are too many and voluminous to read
all of them, I won't be selecting on the basis of
certification anyway. Like Ankh, I'd
want some kind of random element in addition to the list of
diaries I read regularly. I think I'm the one who first
mentioned the connection with David Brin's "Earth" book to
him (brilliant book: read it!) after seeing his mention of a
"buggy algorithm".

roguemtl's
article:
Nice to hear from the other side. Some of the comments refer
to saying thank-you being enough. It's quite true. There are
plenty of people who don't reply to feedback, and plenty who
reply with, well, fairly off-hand comments that make me
disinclined to approach them again. But there are also
dozens and dozens of people who say thanks if you contact
them about their program, (even if the comments are
rubbish!) and it really does make a difference. I'm not
alone in this. I get email from people who foolishly think I
can help with something and I talk to people at shows, and I
see and hear "I did tell them, but I heard nothing back, so
I stopped using it/am switching to the rivals" quite a bit.
And as for seeing your name up in lights: I dunno. I don't
entirely subscribe to the ego-inflation thing that
esr wrote
about. The first time I saw myself being referred to as
having fixed something (in a ChangeLog after I sent some
corrections to a manual), I was actually embarrassed,
because it was in there with all the people who Made It Work
and stopped it core-dumping and so on. But seeing "fixing
Telsa's weirdo bug" in CVS commits is rather... well. Yes.
That's fun.

I have heard that previewing can do dangerous
things to HTML tags, but here's hoping it all survives...

[Edited quite some time later to remove dead links: if it's going to get archived, they had better go]

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
code is live. It needs further work but already handles most
markup better than the original parser.